Canon Giles Fraser and some of his congregation at St Mary Newington, south London. ‘This Easter rising is not just some fancy intellectual idea, it’s a form of praxis.’ Photograph: David Gill

On Friday, all was lost. Richard Dawkins and his smirking acolytes had got it right, blast them. I know the atheist recital better than most. Religion is a busted flush. The dream turned out to have been a fantasy. Perhaps we all got carried away by the charisma. But now, it seems, the one we had followed had over-promised. So it’s time to pack up our chalices and do something useful. Time to admit the truth: it had all been a lie and a waste.

But that was Friday. On Sunday morning, just before dawn, a group of us gathered outside church and kindled a small bonfire. From there we passed the flame to a large candle and processed it into the nave – the tentative, flickering light illuminating the dark corners of the building. And from that large candle, we all lit our own individual candles, passing the light from one to another. Everything now starts again. Hallelujah, Christ is risen. Without this, the whole Christian faith is nonsense.

The resurrection is not an argument, still less a philosophical argument. That’s why rational scepticism about the empty tomb just bounces off the surface. As Jonathan Swift was right to say, you can’t reason people out of something they weren’t reasoned into. The resurrection is more an identity than an argument. That’s why we turn it into participatory theatre, with incense and candles. It is who we are – our word for how we go on in the face of overwhelming odds. It’s the Christian term for defiance.

Mine can be a tough parish. Stuff is always going on. After Easter mass, a car screeched into our car park and crashed into a brick wall, knocking it down. Four guys got out and had a fight. Then they got back in the car and drove off. Stuff like this happens all the time – indeed I called the Brixton police three times on Easter Sunday.

And its not just the daily round of hassle. The church itself was destroyed by Hitler’s incendiary bombs, leaving only a crumbling Victorian tower that locals have used more as a toilet than a place of prayer. We have no money, a heating system that doesn’t work, a church hall that was recently burned out by bored teenagers and, most challenging of all, a community that is not really a community, but often a place people simply pass through. Even the old flats of the notorious Heygate estate have now been demolished and their long-term residents pushed further out of town to make way for the younger and the wealthier. Change and decay in all around I see.

All this sounds pretty miserable. But the resurrection is the name we give to the multiple ways we push back against the darkness. For too long, our little garden of remembrance has been a place thick with the deathly thorns of heroin needles and the excrement of rough-sleepers. But now all that’s been cleared away by a few determined parish gardeners and a little strip of cared-for land has emerged, resplendent with daffodils – a glorious non-compliance with the so-called tragedy of the commons.

Likewise, between Christmas and Easter, we opened up the church to the homeless, with local people, both churchgoers and non-churchgoers, teaming up to cook food and provide guests with a safe place to sleep. One couple cuddled up together under the Lady Chapel altar. I did breakfast duty, with bacon and eggs for 20. Do I believe in the resurrection? Of course I do. And I believe in it by frying bacon and refusing to give up. This Easter rising is not just some fancy intellectual idea, it’s a form of praxis.

I know the Church of England is supposed to be dying. And there are those who want to save it with cod management theory and evangelical up-speak. But if we as a church really believe in death and resurrection, then we don’t really need any of that secular sorcery. There has been a priest in my parish continuously since the reign of King John in the early 13th century. Politicians call it resilience. I call it resurrection.